From Mint:

Siddhartha Deb’s recommendations for the year:

When I discovered the Chilean writer Roberto Bolano last year, I was astonished by the power of his fiction. This year saw the publication of his novel, The Savage Detectives, in English and I found it to be a genuine Third World epic: funny, tender, political, impassioned and brilliant. I was also impressed by the cerebral J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Diary of a Bad Year. Part fiction and part philosophy, it is at all times a provocative handbook on democracy, the modern state, and the abuse of power.
I’ve also received immense pleasure from reading two unusual detective novels. David Peace’s Tokyo Year Zero is a dark and gritty exploration of post-war Japan, glimpsed in the hallucinatory aftershock of defeat and nuclear devastation. Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is more upbeat but equally accomplished. A wonderful hybrid of crime novel and alternate history set in an imaginary Jewish settlement in Alaska, it is tough-guy in tone and lyrical in style. Finally, I’ve read a remarkable debut novel, Lunatic in My Head, by Anjum Hasan, set in the north-eastern town of Shillong. Steeped in memory, loss, and desire, it marks the arrival of a wonderful new talent in Indian writing.

And here are mine:

I have been reading a lot of books about war this year. Right now, I am in the middle of a wonderful memoir—Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet. Samet teaches English at West Point, and it is fascinating to read how American cadets read literature and deal with doubt.
The Abu Ghraib Effect, which I read during the summer, is a fine reminder of why scholarship matters. Written by art historian Stephen Eisenman, it shows that the demeaning poses in which American soldiers photographed Iraqi prisoners had their provenance in a 2,000-year-old tradition of Western art devoted to aestheticizing and eroticizing pain.
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist was a success in the West. I would like to think it was because of the book’s artfulness and charming candour, but I wonder whether the truth might not be more crude. The suave protagonist was someone White readers hadn’t met before, a Muslim man who looked and acted differently from all those they had seen on TV.
I liked Don DeLillo’s Falling Man for its simple surprises. The performer who, in the days following the 11 September attacks, used a cable and a harness to throw himself down from tall buildings. The image caught something about how flagrant art can be. Had DeLillo intended his novel to be like that too?
I am only a few pages into Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, but even a few lines are enough to know that this is a big book. The voice of a major artist reaching into the violence and pain inside the world’s soul.

Thanks, Chandrahas